Rory Leishman:
Statistics Canada projects that for the first time in the history of Confederation the total population of Canada will decline this year. What accounts for this momentous turnaround from rapid population growth to impending decline?
According to Statistics Canada, the immediate cause was the sudden about-face on immigration last year by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Instead of proceeding with plans to admit a record 500,000 new permanent residents during 2025, the government of Canada announced in November that it now aims to cut the total to only 395,000 this year, 380,000 next year, and 365,000 in 2027.
With a federal election impending later this year and the Liberals trailing far behind the Conservatives in popular support, the Trudeau government had no political choice but to reverse course on immigration. Recent opinion polls have made clear that most Canadians have finally come to realize that the determination of the Trudeau government to double the rate of immigration into Canada over the past 10 years was a reckless policy that stoked inflation, precipitated a national housing crisis, and intensified pressure on Canada’s overburdened health-care services.
In the opinion of Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre, the new Liberal immigration plan is not nearly good enough. He promises that his government would cut back the annual number of immigrants to 250,000. While that would be half the level originally projected for this year by the Trudeau government, it would still be far above the average intake of immigrants during the four decades prior to the Liberals’ election victory in 2015.
By reducing the number of immigrants to 250,000 per year, Canada should have little difficulty in avoiding the kind of political turmoil that unassimilated immigrants have provoked in Western Europe, the United States, and most other economically advanced countries. However, substantial cutbacks in immigration will do little or nothing to address another serious national problem; namely, the rapid aging of Canada’s population.
Over the past 50 years, the number of Canadian seniors aged 65 and over has more than doubled as a proportion of the national population, reaching 19 per cent in the 2021 census, up from just eight per cent in 1971. During this same period, the average number of Canadians of working age for every senior has fallen to just 3.5, less than half the total of 7.7 in 1971.
If this aging problem persists in the decades ahead, financing Canada’s underfunded health and welfare systems will become ever more challenging for the dwindling proportion of working-age taxpayers. How did Canada get into such a mess?
While many political, economic and cultural factors have contributed to Canada’s aging population, there can be no doubt that one of the most significant was the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1968-69) introduced by Justin Trudeau’s father, former Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Under the terms of this multifaceted legislation, the most calamitous ever enacted in Canada, Parliament not only legalized abortion, but also authorized the sale, advertisement, and use of contraceptives.
Prior to enactment of this profoundly misguided legislation, birth rates alone in Canada were more than sufficient to maintain the size of Canada’s national population. That era ended in 1972, when, for the first time, Canada’s total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime — fell below the population-replacement level of 2.1.
Ever since, Canada’s total fertility rate has averaged far below 2.1. For this year, the projected ratio is 1.48.
As a direct result of the collapse in birth rates, Canada’s population is now aging so rapidly that the financial viability of the grossly underfunded Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security is in jeopardy; our over-stressed national health-care system is coming under ever more intense pressure; and the burden of Canada’s ever rising national debt threatens to reduce future living standards for our children and grandchildren.
Reverting to massive immigration which can only come from low-income countries in an attempt to head off these problems is out of the question. It would be folly to assume that Canada could retain high levels of immigration without soon incurring the kind of social and political turmoil that has prompted the initiation or advocacy of severe cuts in immigration by political movements as diverse as the Social Democrat government of Denmark, the Labour government of Australia, and the leading conservative parties of France, Germany, and Switzerland.
There can be only one solution to Canada’s demographic crisis: A sharp reversal in the decline in Canadian birth rates. How that goal might be achieved is far from clear. It is a topic that gets little public attention, but merits urgent consideration by Canadian opinion leaders, researchers and policy-makers alike.
